“The Gender-Fluid History of the Philippines”

France Villarta, the speaker, was an eight-year-old kid in the mid-1990s who grew up in

Southern Philippines. He lived in a place where there was little to no expectation of privacy where

everyone at that neighborhood would hear even the softest sound. Each house was made mostly of wood

and corrugated metal sheets along unpaved roads. Like any other kid, he learned what a family looked

like - it was a man, a woman, and a child or children. But he also learned, it wasn't always that way.

There was this family of three that he knew who lived down the street. The lady of the house

named Lenie who happened to be a transgender woman. She had a long black hair, often in a ponytail,

and manicured nails. She always went out with a little make up on and her signature red lipstick. She

has a husband who had a thing for white sleeveless shirts and gold chains around his neck. And their

daughter who was younger than France. Lenie owned the most popular beauty salon in their village

which also made her name and family known to their place. She exemplified one of the Philippine's long

standing stories about gender diversity and she’s a proof that oftentimes we think of something as

strange only because we're not familiar with it.

In most cultures around the world, gender is this man-woman dichotomy. We set expectations

the moment a person's biological sex is determined. In other words, we create gender norms. But not all

cultures are as rigid. Some communities of different countries, especially Philippines, have a long

history of cultural permissiveness and accommodation of gender variances. The Philippines were under

Spanish rule for over 300 years. Scholars who have studied the Spanish colonial archives says that these

early societies were largely egalitarian. Where men did not necessarily have an advantage over women

and wives are companions not slaves.

 In certain respects, women were more powerful than males, but the main secret to the precolonial

Filipino woman's strength was in her job as "babaylan," a person with not particularly outstanding skills.

Despite being a feminine function, there were male practitioners in the spiritual worlds as well. Several

allusions to male shamans who did not conform to traditional western masculine norms may be found in

early Spanish chroniclers' reports. As you may have guessed by this point, these pre-colonial cultures'

behavior wasn't particularly well received. The Spanish missionaries spent the following 300 years

attempting to enforce their two-sex, two-gender paradigm when all the gender equality wokeness at the

time smashed violently into the sensitivities of Europe. Many Spanish friars also thought that the cross-

dressing babaylan were either celibates like themselves or had malformed genitals. But this was pure

speculation as many works, including The Bolinao Manuscript mentions male shamans marrying

woman.

In all his discussions about gender, he thinks it's important to keep in mind that the prevailing

notions of man and woman as static genders anchored strictly on biological sex are social constructs that

are an imposition. But the good thing about social constructs is they can be reconstructed for a world

that's starting to realize we have so much to gain from learning and working through our differences. As

he stands on the stage, on the shoulders of people like Lenie, he feels incredibly grateful for all who

have come before him, the ones courageous enough to put themselves out there, who lived a life that

was theirs and in the process, made it a little easier for us to live our lives now. Because being yourself

is revolutionary.